If Britain’s venerable
parliament has been eroded by the emulation of the American presidential model, the late arrival of US-style live debates has certainly proved welcome compensation. Indeed, one of the first televised combats struck a decisive knell: in the 2008 London mayoral campaign, the incumbent Ken Livingstone provoked pantomime boos as he likened his method of winning the 2012 Olympic Games to a card trick. With the initial nominal budget already quadrupling to £9 billion, Londoners unamused by this whopping sleight went on to crown his rival Boris Johnson with 53 per cent of the vote. Magicians, it seems, reveal their methods at their peril. And yet Livingstone’s remaining 47 per cent suggested a marked citywide ambivalence towards the issue. Almost as many as were angered actually admired the deviousness in generating the funding for the renewal of a huge neglected area around east London. Instead of focusing on the ephemera of the Games, politicians emphasised the rhetoric of regeneration; of amenity and infrastructure; of long-term legacies. Only as people dissented from this narrative did the underlying
tensions between connection and isolation become exposed. Communities voiced their displacement, a sentiment that found its tangible emblem in the monochromatic fence that rose to secure the colossal site’s perimeter. ‘A viscous slither of blue,’ as the London chronicler Iain Sinclair described it, ‘like disinfectant running down the slopes of a silver urinal trough’. As the transition got under way he noted the disjunction between imagery and actuality, the barricade unvisualised in computer-generated versions. ‘The current experience, in reality, is all fence,’ he complained in 2008. Now with this infamous barrier
largely dismantled or replaced with sunnier decorative hoardings, the time has come to attract attention to Stratford’s work in progress. Hailed as the ‘largest building site in Europe’, the interim landscape presents a special state of flux. The high-speed rail link from central London (taking only six minutes) has recently opened, yet many of the sporting venues remain silhouetted structures, mere suggestive shapely shells. Earlier this summer – roughly
midway between Sinclair’s musings and the 2012 opening ceremony – a beautiful pop-up restaurant, Studio
East Dining, celebrated the spectacle of this pivotal moment. Designed by young London-based practice Carmody Groarke, the project derived its particular poignancy as a pin-pricking counterpoint to the scale of the Olympic operation; and in its positioning within the polarised opinions surrounding the iteration of this ancient competition and the expansive urban transformation it will entrench. While the justification for the London Games is a settlement projected decades into the future, the duration of Studio East Dining was three weeks; the gap between the first briefing and the restaurant’s opening night was (what must have been for the architects) a terrifying 10 weeks. Where the budget for the larger region is suffixed with an unfathomable amount of zeroes, this pop-up diner was delivered for the price of a modest London back- extension. The pavilion’s cleverness is in the line it takes between permanence and transience, and its exploration of what constitutes value. The 800m2
dining room is placed
on a 35m-high flat roof which presents fantastic elevated views, the Olympic site in the foreground segueing seamlessly into the
The Architectural Review / October 2010 / Buildings 053
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